1. Technical Field
This invention relates to a network; and more particularly relates to a network having a network management system coupled to a wide area network having high speed switches.
2. Description of Prior Art
In a known wide area network (WAN) having a network management System (NMS) and various nodes (switches) communicating via an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and/or frame relay, each node sends status information to the network management system in traps containing status information. In an implementation of a network management system according to the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) v1, the protocol for communicating traps to the network management system does not call for confirming that a trap reaches the network management system, so there is the possibility that relying on only receiving traps from each node could result in the network management system not being made aware in a timely manner of a change in status of a node. Therefore, each node is regularly polled for such status information. This polling is an inefficient use of network bandwidth.
One disadvantage of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) v1 is that the amount of network management polling required to circumvent potential trap loss leads to excessive management traffic.